(CNN) -- A Utah professor allegedly caught looking at child pornography during a Delta airlines flight said Monday at a court hearing that he is innocent, the Suffolk County, Massachusetts, District Attorney's office said.
A passenger aboard Grant D. Smith's Salt Lake City to Boston flight on Saturday spotted him looking at what appeared to be images of young girls, nude and performing sex acts, and alerted the flight crew and a family member, who in turn notified law enforcement, according to a statement from the district attorney's office.
When a flight attendant asked Smith to shut down his computer, he instead began deleting images from it, prosecutor Erik Bennett said, CNN affiliate WCVB reported. Police who met the plane were able to recover 66 images from the computer, said the station, citing authorities.
Smith's Apple MacBook Pro laptop and iphone were seized as evidence and investigators will seek a search warrant to examine their contents thoroughly, according to the statement.
"These weren't photos of a naked child in the bath that a parent might keep," said Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel Conley. "These were explicitly sexual and extremely disturbing."Troopers recovered from the computer a number of still images depicting young girls, some naked and some engaged in explicit sexual activity with adult males, Conley said in the news release. Based on captions embedded in the images and troopers’ estimates, the children depicted were between the ages of 5 and 14 years old.
During Monday's hearing, a judge imposed bail of $75,000 and ordered Smith to return to court on December 27. He pleaded not guilty.
If Smith posts bail, the judge ordered the father of two not have any unsupervised contact with children under the age of 16 or use the Internet for anything other than business purposes. He would also be required to allow law enforcement to search his personal and work computers at any time.
Smith, 47, is a professor of material science and engineering at the University of Utah. He has been placed on administrative leave pending resolution of the criminal case, the school said.
"Professor Smith deserves a full and fair investigation into this issue," the school said in a statement. "The University of Utah, however, has no tolerance for viewing or possessing of child pornography by any of its employees, regardless of where it occurs."
He will be fired if the allegations are proved to be true, the school said.
Smith received a bachelor's degree from the school in 1985 and finished his doctorate in 1990, according to the school's website.
He is also president of Wasatch Molecular Inc., a consulting company that helps companies develop advanced materials, according to the company's website.
He was previously an assistant professor at the University of Missouri in Columbia and a senior research scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in California, according to his biography on the company's website.
He's been on the faculty at the University of Utah since 1997, according to his Wasatch biography.
A victim's advocate told WCVB that the brazen nature of the allegation is shocking.
"The notion that someone would be so bold as to view it in public is extraordinary, and I'm not sure what the explanation is," Wendy Murphy told the station.
A passenger aboard Grant D. Smith's Salt Lake City to Boston flight on Saturday spotted him looking at what appeared to be images of young girls, nude and performing sex acts, and alerted the flight crew and a family member, who in turn notified law enforcement, according to a statement from the district attorney's office.
When a flight attendant asked Smith to shut down his computer, he instead began deleting images from it, prosecutor Erik Bennett said, CNN affiliate WCVB reported. Police who met the plane were able to recover 66 images from the computer, said the station, citing authorities.
Smith's Apple MacBook Pro laptop and iphone were seized as evidence and investigators will seek a search warrant to examine their contents thoroughly, according to the statement.
"These weren't photos of a naked child in the bath that a parent might keep," said Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel Conley. "These were explicitly sexual and extremely disturbing."Troopers recovered from the computer a number of still images depicting young girls, some naked and some engaged in explicit sexual activity with adult males, Conley said in the news release. Based on captions embedded in the images and troopers’ estimates, the children depicted were between the ages of 5 and 14 years old.
During Monday's hearing, a judge imposed bail of $75,000 and ordered Smith to return to court on December 27. He pleaded not guilty.
If Smith posts bail, the judge ordered the father of two not have any unsupervised contact with children under the age of 16 or use the Internet for anything other than business purposes. He would also be required to allow law enforcement to search his personal and work computers at any time.
Smith, 47, is a professor of material science and engineering at the University of Utah. He has been placed on administrative leave pending resolution of the criminal case, the school said.
"Professor Smith deserves a full and fair investigation into this issue," the school said in a statement. "The University of Utah, however, has no tolerance for viewing or possessing of child pornography by any of its employees, regardless of where it occurs."
He will be fired if the allegations are proved to be true, the school said.
Smith received a bachelor's degree from the school in 1985 and finished his doctorate in 1990, according to the school's website.
He is also president of Wasatch Molecular Inc., a consulting company that helps companies develop advanced materials, according to the company's website.
He was previously an assistant professor at the University of Missouri in Columbia and a senior research scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in California, according to his biography on the company's website.
He's been on the faculty at the University of Utah since 1997, according to his Wasatch biography.
A victim's advocate told WCVB that the brazen nature of the allegation is shocking.
"The notion that someone would be so bold as to view it in public is extraordinary, and I'm not sure what the explanation is," Wendy Murphy told the station.
